Speech therapy is a form of treatment that evaluates and treats speech disorders and communication problems. It helps people develop skills such as comprehension, clarity, voice, fluency and sound production.
Speech therapy
can treat speech disorders in childhood or in adults caused by stroke, brain injury, or other conditions. Speech disorders affect millions of people and their ability to communicate.The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimates that 5% of children in the U. S. 3 to 17 years of age have had a speech disorder in the past 12 months. Some speech disorders can be overcome, while others are lifelong conditions.
In any case, therapy with a speech therapist can help a person make the most of their speech abilities and develop alternative methods of communication. Speech is how people produce sounds and words, according to the American Speech, Language and Hearing Association (ASHA). Speech problems may include an inability to make sounds clearly, a hoarseness of voice, or stuttering (repetition of sounds or pauses when speaking). Dysarthria is the result of muscle weakness due to brain damage.
The severity of the condition can vary and may be accompanied by other conditions, such as apraxia of speech. People with dysarthria may mispronounce their words, speak slowly or too fast, speak quietly, sound robotic, and not be able to move their mouth or tongue properly. Some people's voices sound different from before the injury. A child who can't make speech sounds correctly at age 4 could have a speech disorder, also known as a phonological disorder or articulation disorder.
However, speech and sound disorders don't just affect children. Adults may have had a disorder since childhood or may have acquired this disorder after suffering brain damage. A person who stutters may repeat full words or sounds, lengthen sounds, or have difficulty saying certain words. These are known as repetitions, extensions and blocks, respectively.
While everyone can stutter from time to time, stuttering becomes a speech disorder when it interferes with a person's ability to communicate with others and is accompanied by negative feelings when speaking. There is no specific cause for stuttering. It could be the result of differences in children's brains. In many cases, there is a family history of stuttering.
Most children start to stutter between the ages of 2 and 6.If the stutter lasts longer than 6 months, treatment with a speech therapist may be necessary. Baylor's online SLP master's program can be completed full-time in 20 months or part-time in 25 months. Speech apraxia (OSA) occurs when the neural pathway between the brain and a person's speech function (speech muscles) is lost or obscured. The person knows what they want to say, they can even write down what they want to say on paper.
However, the brain can't send the right messages, so the speech muscles can articulate what it means, even though the speech muscles themselves work well. Many SLPs specialize in treating apraxia. Stuttering, also known as stuttering, is so common that everyone knows what it sounds like and can easily recognize it. Everyone has probably had moments of stuttering at least once in their life.
The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders estimates that three million Americans stutter and reports that, of the up to 10 percent of children who do stutter, three-quarters of them will outgrow it. Not to be confused with clutter. Dysarthria is a symptom of damage to nerves or muscles. It occurs as difficulty speaking, slow speech, limited movements of the tongue, jaw or lips, abnormal rhythm and tone when speaking, changes in voice quality, difficulty articulating, difficulty speaking, and other related symptoms.
As an SLP, there's not much you can do about muscle damage, and even less you can do about nerve damage. Therefore, for treatments you'll focus on managing the symptoms of dysarthria through behavioral changes. This may include helping a person slow down when speaking, training breathing and exercising the muscles involved in speech. A lay term “cluttering” can be recognized by anyone and is very common.
Speech-language pathologists provide an additional level of experience treating patients with speech and language disorders. They can ensure that cluttering is not confused with another type of disorder such as apraxia, aphasia impaired expressive language development or a speech impairment caused by hearing loss. Spasmodic dysphonia (SD) is a long-term chronic disorder that affects the voice. It is characterized by a spasm of the vocal cords when a person tries to speak and produces a voice that can be described as shaky hoarseness moaning tense or nervous.
It can cause the emphasis of speech to vary considerably. Many SLPs specialize in treating spasmodic dysphonia. Have you ever heard people talk about being intelligent but also nervous in large groups of people and then self-diagnosing that they have Asperger's syndrome? You may have heard a similar lay diagnosis about this disorder which is an indication of how common this disorder is as well as how crucial SLPs are in making a proper diagnosis of the disorder. Disorder “cluttering” is characterized by a person's speech being too fast too abrupt or both; To qualify as cluttered the person's speech must also contain excessive amounts of “good” um “such as “hmm” or “like that” (speech disfluences) an excessive exclusion or collapse of syllables or abnormal tensions or rhythms of syllables; The first symptoms of this disorder appear in childhood; Like other flow disorders SLPs can have a big impact on improving or eliminating this disorder; The intervention is most effective in the early stages of life however adults can also benefit from working with an SLP.
